First of all, thanks to everyone for all your comments. At the very least, you've helped me realize that I'm going about this the wrong way. If I keep trying to make my karate training "fit" my aikido training, then maybe that means I should just focus on aikido...

In the meantime I will give my current shotokan school more time with (hopefully) less or no "aikido bias". I will update with any findings sometime in the future.